User:Skoojal

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Hello. I'm Skoojal and this is my user page. Anyone who wants to contact me can do so here: a.quadrant@yahoo.com.

I used to consider myself a Christian, but then sad experiences on wikipedia shook my faith in God. I am now an agnostic.

Don't look for me to change my gender, however; I'm just not that kind of guy.

I am a wikipedian who believes in full disclosure of my knowledge or lack of it concerning the subjects I edit.

Two examples. I have extensively edited the article on Simon LeVay, despite the fact that I have no knowledge whatever of brain science, and only a basic general knowledge of research on sexual orientation. I do not think that this disqualifies me from editing that article; in fact, I am confident that the article is now considerably better than it was before I started work on it. The article was in such a mess at that stage that only a little knowledge of what it was about, and some common sense, were enough for me to be able to make major improvements.

Then there's the article on Manichaeism. I have made major changes there too, despite having only a basic general knowledge of the subject. I am not a real scholar of Gnosticism, although I have read some books about it. Early in my Wikipedia career, in January 2008, I corrected what seemed to be a significant factual error (eg, that Mani accepted Plato and Hermes as prophets) in the Manichaeism article. My noticing of that error was what inspired me to start making changes on Wikipedia. I have disregarded the well intentioned suggestion [[1]] that 'people should not contribute to this article unless they have read and thoroughly understood at least a few recent scholarly books/outlines of Manichaeism, and additionally, are familiar with the textual problems of reading at least one of the Manichaean writings in its source - whether it be in Latin, Coptic, Greek, Syriac, Middle Persian, Soghdian, Turkish, or Chinese, or at least a secondary source, such as Latin, Greek, Modern Persian, or Arabic.' If an article is bad enough that even the man in the street can improve it, then let this be done.